Main Engine Cut Off - T+149: Let’s Talk About Starship with Tim Dodd, the Everyday Astronaut

Episode Date: February 28, 2020

Tim Dodd, the Everyday Astronaut, joins me to talk all about SpaceX’s Starship, its history thus far, it’s nearly-impossible-to-keep-up-with development in the open, and what we may see in the coming months. We make some timeline predictions, talk about the predicament of Boca Chica, and both randomly stumble into completely unsupported theories.This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 37 executive producers—Brandon, Kris, Pat, Matt, Jorge, Brad, Ryan, Nadim, Peter, Donald, Lee, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, John, Moritz, Joel, Jan, Grant, Mike, David, Mints, Joonas, Robb, Tim Dodd the Everyday Astronaut, Frank, Julian and Lars from Agile Space, Tommy, Adam, and six anonymous—and 345 other supporters.TopicsEveryday AstronautEveryday Astronaut (@Erdayastronaut) / TwitterEveryday Astronaut - YouTubeStarship | SpaceXStarship Development Thread - r/spacexA conversation with Elon Musk about Starship - YouTubeIs SpaceX's Raptor engine the king of rocket engines? - YouTubeAre Aerospikes Better Than Bell Nozzles? - YouTubeThe ShowLike the show? Support the show!Email your thoughts, comments, and questions to [e-mail] @WeHaveMECOListen to MECO HeadlinesJoin the Off-Nominal DiscordSubscribe on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Spotify, Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn or elsewhereSubscribe to the Main Engine Cut Off NewsletterBuy shirts and Rocket Socks from the Main Engine Cut Off ShopMusic by Max Justus

Hello and welcome to Main Engine Cutoff, I am Anthony Colangelo. Today I've got a special guest with me again. It's been a little bit of time since I've talked about Starship on this show, so I wanted to get somebody on to discuss it with, because it is moving so fast that it's hard to keep up with, and I don't have a lot of analysis day-to-day on it, but I do have a lot of stuff that I want to talk about. So I got our very special friend, Mr. Tim Dodd, the Everett astronaut himself, to come join me on the show for a nice long chat about Starship. So without further ado, let's give Tim a call. Hello Tim Dodd welcome to Main Engine Cutoff. Thanks for having me it's good to see you. It's your first time on the show you've been on Off

Nominal and you are mentioned frequently on Main Engine Cutoff I just want to put it out up front that you did not buy your way onto the show by way of an executive producership you are just here as a guest. I didn't? Well maybe you did i don't know did you get the did you get the chocolates that i sent and the and all the all the flowers and that nice little like bonsai bush did you get all that check the post office i gotta i gotta go out there later on today i'll see if it's there well i assumed it was a buy-in thing but maybe i'll take those back i guess maybe that's paying it forward i'll bring them down for dm2 you know i gotta say man i'm a big fan of your show.

Oh, thanks. Honestly, I like that you cover so many things that I don't have time to think about. Likewise. This is why you're here. Well, that's what's so cool about this whole space community is there's people that are taking so many, there's so many different facets to be able to talk about anyway. And different, you know, there's, you can cover like little bits of things here and there and get really deep into certain things or deep into the hardware you just cover so many

other things that like i they don't even blip my radar sometimes and i'll be like wait i haven't even heard about this and you're you're talking to an expert on it and i just love that about your show so yeah and then on the other hand you've got a what was that an hour long raptor uh video how long was that video that video was 50 or 48 or something the aerospike one was an hour oh yeah that's the one that was an hour yeah so you're doing these things that i don't ever bring up on the show and it was an hour long video that probably took a year right it took a long that was like a four month when i'm in the middle of i'm shooting this weekend a five month long research paper about how much do rockets pollute oh yeah I've been seeing you tease that one that's gonna be

crazy that's been the rabbit hole of rabbit holes man because as soon as I'm like okay I finally got this and then I'm like nope found a different research paper that basically contradicts that and has all this data I'm just like well I don't know I'm excited for that well they i roped you into this because uh i have not talked about starship on the main show probably since that event that you were at a couple of months back that was what september down in boca chica yeah i think end of september so i wanted to just have like a wide-ranging discussion because there's so much going on with it that deserves conversation but it's like i try to keep the signal to noise high on the show where I'm only doing a show.

If I have like an analysis thing to roll out there or something unique to provide and not just, you know, putting out shows just to put out shows. So with Starship, it's like active development, active development. And I don't have a lot of takes on it.

I'm like, wow, that was pretty cool that they're doing all that stuff. So, uh, I, you know, I'm, I'm kind of in the same boat right now because it just feels like wow that was pretty cool that they're doing all that stuff so uh i you know i'm all i'm kind of in the same boat right now because it just feels like it's we're watching

them do like real time they're playing kerbal in real life 100 quite frankly and this is what i think elon how how him and his engineering team or the people he's surrounded himself with at least understand that's a really good way to figure out flaws you know basically rapid prototyping and rapid development of things you're gonna see things change and see things get like really far along and then get scrapped really far along get scrapped really far along plans change you know constantly over and over and it's really exhausting for us watching but at the same time like man what a cool way to do something, you know? So you were down there in September for that big event.

They had Mark 1, if I can keep my terminology straight, sitting behind them, which then a few months later, I don't even remember the timelines on this. When did that one blow up? It was only a couple of weeks ago at this point, I guess, right? It was in November, believe it or not. That was November? Oh, my God. That was November when they blew the top off of it okay so when you were there and that thing

was together did you get the sense that anyone suspected the top was gonna blow off or did you feel like there was confidence in the hodgepodge looking uh tiled together starship that that was um and i know this is people gonna be like yeah right i knew that that was a mock-up yeah i it especially when you see like to really make the fins and all those things actuate there would have been a lot of additional hardware um attached the legs weren't even legs yet they're basically just you know cheap you know shrouds that they put over where the legs would have been you know it was it was it was a mock-up it was about you know a shrouds that they put over where the legs would have been. You know, it was a mock-up. It was about, you know, kind of low fidelity at this point mock-up.

But it was, at the same time, it wasn't just a mock-up. It was them starting to begin to learn how do we do, you know, circumferential. How do you say it? Circumferential. Oh, man. Circumferential. Help me. We'll edit this in post.

Circumferential. I don't even know what word you're trying to say now. You've confused me so post. Circumference. I don't even know what word you're trying to say now. You've confused me so much. Circumferential? I have too and not circumferential. Thank you. Something about circumference.

Yes. Circles. Circumferential. There we go. Yeah, circle welding. There we go. Diametorial welding. It's way easier to type that word than to say it.

It is. I just realized i don't know if i've really ever said it uh but you know they had to learn in real time really how to do uh you know new welding techniques on on on this whole thing the whole thing has just been a giant science project so mark one and mark two out here in in florida um you know both of those vehicles were kind of just like let let's play around. Let's let each team kind of develop how they're going to stack rings, how they're going to weld these rings, how they're going to mount them to each other, how they're going to do

all these things and then make improvements from that. Like, see what works best, see what doesn't work at all. And then like, we'll make improvements. And that's exactly what Mark I was. In retrospect, hearing Elon talk about it at the starship event he's he seemed to sell it that this is going to be the one that actually does this is going on this is in 20 kilometers right i think it didn't take long for them to be like yeah no i'm always wondering about how they plan this stuff i mean i know this is all scrappy but it seems like they are working

on any given version and they, they have some ideas of what they might be able to test with it. And then they start building a thing. And then all of a sudden they're like, you know what, actually only these three things are what we're testing on this version. And then we're going to keep moving. So I'm curious about that kind of process of,

cause even now we're seeing this next one that they're building with the actual rings is serial number one. And that was like, okay, this will fly. And now it looks like that's gonna just static fire and there's serial number two maybe that'll get closer to flying so there's this process of figuring out what is testable on any given thing and i think that's good overall but i do wonder how long they can do that without driving themselves totally nuts so you're right and i think the reason that they won't totally drive

themselves or more or less elon won't drive the people nuts is that they're planning to be producing they're basically making a new fuselage once a month at this rate almost ish you know maybe once every six weeks they will can have a fully manufactured fuselage if they keep up at this pace so really it's not a matter of like um it's not necessarily a thing of like totally changing our mind it's more like hey look at how many improvements we've made from this seal number one to seal number two and the seal number three is already being made while we're rolling out serial number two and that already has these improvements you know we don't want to totally fail on the 20 kilometer hop. So what's going to be our best chance, the quickest,

but best chance of succeeding, you know, and it's obviously wouldn't be a quick turnaround if the 20 kilometer hop ends up with a giant belly flop straight down on their propellant farm. Yeah. That would be a big problem. That would be a really big problem. So,

um, there's definitely a part of that. That's like, they're there. And it's just totally different from other companies that do everything on paper very very well planned and articulated years in advance and we're seeing the like the exact opposite of that it's just really weird i guess you're right in that like even if they were let's say they throw out serial number one through five

well at least they're working out all the tooling processes so like everything that gets up to that point of being thrown out was useful and that you're iterating on processes that you're using internally so there it's not like you know if they don't finish the test that they originally slated for the thing that it was useless they still are working out a bunch of other stuff in the process of getting there exactly well and a lot of the things you know say serial number one goes out and they just end up pressure testing it and static firing it. Think about how many new style valves and new style umbilical connections and new things

have changed from Starship that serial number one will help validate. You know, there's so many things. And we should really quickly mention the naming scheme kind of goes, you know, there's Star Hopper, the little, we all know what Star Hopper is the little guy with legs exactly exactly r2d2 farting a bunch um and then then it went from mark one was kind of the one that was in the presentation uh down in boca chica mark two was being kind of simultaneously built at a off-site place in coco flor, Florida, which is like 20 kilometers away from Kennedy Space Center, by the way. So that was always unusual. Those two vehicles kind

of seized development, and now they kind of switched to serial number one, serial number two, serial number three, are these new ones that we're seeing coming out of Boca Chica now. And those are the ones more intended for actual testing purposes. Because it's really confusing when they switch from Mark I, Mark II, and all of a sudden now it's serial number one, and it's the third. Well, when have they ever had consistent naming

on anything that they do? Yeah, especially with Tesla, too. I don't know if you pay attention to Tesla's naming scheme, but that is just like... It's all over the place. No one can... Yeah, all over the place.

But yeah, so it's been a matter of like, I, a part of me thinks this stuff happens all the time behind closed doors. You know, I bet blue origin does a lot of this prototyping, a lot of this, like, Hey,

let's take a piece and see what's the easiest way to actually manufacture it in this manner. But it's physically literally behind closed doors. Whereas we're just in this weird time. And even SpaceX probably did that all the time with the Falcon 9. We just didn't see it. And now we're just literally physically seeing it because it's primarily being built outdoors. 100%.

And that is something that kind of drives me nuts in the coverage of this is that there is a uniqueness to SpaceX in what they're doing, but they get credit for everything that they do out in the open, whereas other people only get credit for what they actually roll out of a hangar. So there's this difference in perspective where it's like, well, no one else is doing this. And it's like,

they probably are, but it's in that giant building they built out on the Cape and they don't want you to see it. And that's okay. And even right. You're right. Like SpaceX in the early days, if you look at that,

uh, that like junkyard that was next to Hawthorne headquarters, if you just go on Google maps, look at satellite view, there's like a whole bunch of stuff in there that you're like, Oh, I recognize some of these parts. Yes, exactly. And people might tend to put too much weight in the things that they're seeing, like, or the things that even Elon says on Twitter, Elon might be like, Hey, you know, we've, we're going to try doing this on this number. You know, we're going to see right now, there's a debate of how many engines are going to be on what vehicle

and what vehicle is going to be doing what, right? That could change tomorrow. It likely will. That could have changed last night. And it likely, exactly. In the time that we're doing this show, we are saying something that is out of date, 100%. Which is exactly why I've kind of stepped, for a little while I was kind of trying to just constantly cover almost like a weekly update.

But by the time that show comes out, stuff changes. And that's just the pace of this development slash the openness. And people are reading into absolutely everything that someone takes a photograph of. Hey, look at that COPV. That one's twice as long. Therefore, it's going to be used for this, this, and this. It's like, that might just be the only one they could get their hands on for the time because they're just trying to test this one system.

Yeah, the other one's flight was delayed, so this is the one that's here. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. And the manufacturer whatever was out of them. That's what we're seeing right now is just the craziest science project in real life Kerbal Space Program.

And it's as exciting as it also can be frustrating to try to really keep up with it all but once we actually see that 20 kilometer hop and the belly flop oh man yeah that's going to be pretty amazing whenever that happens I would I have no idea when it's going to

happen but it's going to be a sight I'm sure so is that going to be the next time you're in Boca Chica or are you gonna be making any other trips out there or now that you've been there once are you going wow I'm never going there again because it's a pain in the ass to get to I don't know where you're out of that I've been there four times four times I've been there and spent way too much time down there I think altogether I spent about two months of my life down there and honestly waiting for Starhopper for And honestly, waiting for Starhopper.

For the reference, waiting for Starhopper. And just for reference, Boca Chica is weird. Brownsville is pretty cool. South Padre is actually pretty great. So if you're going down there for vacation or trying to catch one of these launches, don't shy away from South Padre. It's a really cool place.

And Brownsville is making some big changes. But it's a really cool place and brownsville's making some big changes but it's it is a pain in the butt for me to get down there um you know it's a full two-day drive situation straight basically so yeah yeah the boca chica thing is probably something that we could talk about that isn't going to change too much day to day but it's a real situation they're in where they're they have you know they've been buying out some houses in boca chica village they're still i think last i heard there was like 20 some people that haven't sold yet but there is a big fight going on between them and spacex and the county what did you pick up on from being down there and kind of seeing some of that firsthand yeah there's all sorts of different attitudes from from everyone you know

there's some people that are, and all this makes sense. I'm not pinning blame or putting, you know, like on anyone, because it totally makes sense on both sides of things. Like, of course, SpaceX has this really rare opportunity to have a private launch site that can support an infrastructure like this in the U.S. Like, that's insane. That's really cool. And there's about 15, really there's only about,

there's about a dozen houses maybe they're actually inhabited um and a lot of those people you know just recently bought it they bought them you know some of these houses for like 20 30 40 50 grand you know some of them like 100 just depends some of them are you know half of that village is like derelict and and completely uh isolated and and there's no anything out there but there's people that you know are really sad because like this is where we've lived for x number of years we don't know where else we'll go and of course the counter argument to that is like okay of course like no one wants to get kicked out of their house no one wants to be told you can't live here anymore

but if if you buy a house for eighty,000 and now you're getting offered $320,000 for that same piece of land, did you really lose out that much? There should be a lot more awesome opportunities coming up with a large sum of money that you couldn't have been afforded to prior. I know life's not always about money, but at the same time, I don't think it's totally unfair,

and it's for the safety of that area too. Yeah. And certainly there's a lot goes into, you know, the County decided that this was something that County and the state really are investing in SpaceX being there and having a big presence. So there are municipal like fights going on between these people.

And I'm sure some are going to say, well, if I hold out for a little longer, they're going to to pay me more so there's some of that calculation going in but you're right there are people that don't want to leave have you this kind of somewhat related in attitudes have you ever heard of a place called centralia pennsylvania no i haven't this is about two hours northwest of me um And it's different in that the county isn't stepping in to push these people out,

or they tried to, but they couldn't. And there's no company paying these people. But this is a place that in 1960, this is one of the coal mining towns in Pennsylvania, there was a coal fire that started up underground in 1960 and burnt through the whole mine.

And it's still burning today And there's like toxic gases coming out of this place So everybody left except there's still five people that live in this town They will not leave the county told them they had to get out that that got overturned by courts There was this whole thing they removed the zip code from this place the mayor died So there's no more mayor and there's still five people that live in centralia so it is you know a different situation but like sometimes people don't want to leave even when their literal town is on fire and there's toxic gases coming out of the ground around them so i was just thinking about that a lot crumbled and gone yeah there's literally this is one part of the highway that has been like out and they've now rerouted around the town.

So there's this, it's called the Graffiti Highway. It's actually really cool. You should look it up. But it just makes me think of like, sometimes people don't want to leave. And this is an even weirder situation that has a company involved. Centralia is just people versus municipalities. This is like company, municipality, and people. This is like company, municipality, and people.

And I do feel like it is a kind of big problem for SpaceX because it's something that isn't easily solved by iterating on hardware or anything like that. It's something that is in their way, you know? It is a loaded subject. And that's why I tend to not talk too much about it because I'm not involved. I don't know what it's like to have someone knock on it's like we have no idea what that process is yeah but i'm also like in the grand scheme of humanity uh this and this is my opinion i think that the starship program and having redundant launch sites like

like this having you know boca chica open up to be able to be a full light launch site with you know all that stuff on top of Cape Canaveral and things like that is extremely important moving forward, especially if we're someday talking about moving heavy industry off of Earth or getting humans onto another planet long term or permanently, deflecting an asteroid, things like this. I think in the grand scheme of things, that's significantly more important than, um, than someone really liking the house that they're in that, um, could be, you know, it could be torn down by a hurricane in a month, you know, like who it's, it's not a permanent thing. Like a house is great and a house is home, but like nothing is permanent in

that sense. Absolutely. Especially on low lying coastal areas areas. It's not like you're living on a very sturdy mountaintop somewhere. Right. They're constantly in fear of flooding and stuff. Yeah. I do wonder, though, if at a certain point, obviously SpaceX is in deep with Texas, but if they are building out a lot at Kennedy Space Center, where it sounds like they're going to be flying a lot of missions from 39A for Starship. And if they're doing a lot of suborbital testing of Starship from Boca Chica, we have a lot of big deserts that have military ranges in the country. And it doesn't seem unlikely to me that

we could see some suborbital testing move out to White Sands or Spaceport America or something that actively wants this kind of activity. Because there there are places there are so many spaceports in america that have zero activity that are dying for some of this and if yeah at a certain point bocachica is not going to work out for them i wouldn't be shocked to see them move suborbital stuff elsewhere that's that's true i the only thing that i think is really important to think about with i still think and this is my dumb, this is me holding onto a thing that I'm like, I still think it's there, you know, even though I'm warning people against doing that. I still think they're going to end up doing like sea launch because of that, like that animation that they had with point to point. I think when you have a vehicle this big,

you know, this is bigger, more powerful than the Saturn V, has a lot more propellant, and it's just going to grow. You know, this will be the smallest baby Starship they ever make, will be the first one. You know, 110 meters tall, nine meters wide. That is a massive vehicle. I still think we'll start to see that actually be like built on land or like the port of LA, like they're talking about, you know, renewing that lease and signing that lease still, building in Pocahontas, building Kennedy Space Center, and literally putting vehicles on a ship and putting them out to like an oil rig for launch and landing i just think that's the best way to if these things are launching constantly the best way to keep public safe and not have like constant sonic booms and things like that too i just i can

foresee that being in the future in the next five or ten years yeah i wouldn't so therefore like deserts just and and transporting these huge things would be really hard to do yeah well partially the desert thing is that like if i'm going to compare welding stuff together on a seaside coastal area with salt air and water and a lot of weather versus desert yeah i'm going to pick desert because it's basically like you know put a roof up and you're fine. Yeah, that's true. That's true. They definitely have to contend with a lot of weather and rapidly changing weather out there all the time.

So yeah, you're definitely not wrong. I don't know. I guess I'm a desert theorist at this point. I literally just developed this theory while we were talking, by the way. This wasn't something that I had in my back pocket going into this. I just started thinking about how everyone is dying for activity out in the deserts. One thing that I'm curious about now

is there's this Port of LA talk as well, that they're back in the Port of LA for a building that's Starship-related. I think it's the same site that they had last year, right? And then they bailed on that, and now it's back. It seems like they're gonna kind of focus that as a starship development area maybe some uh more like there have obviously have a lot of workforce out there so maybe they've got some more advanced stuff that

they're going to do with starship do you have any theories on what we're going to see out in la that perplexes me because i i think it is mostly just like room to grow. And, you know, if they can move some of the, the manufacturing things that are Starship only out to there and, and where it's going to be shipped anyway, I guess that makes sense.

But I, and they are also bursting at the seams at Hawthorne, you know, their Hawthorne facility is like just bursting at the seams. I can see where they would need more space. You know, if they're going to be working on, say, like thrust structures, the things that are nine meters wide, you're not going to be transporting that easily over the road from Hawthorne, like downtown L.A., basically. That will be an absolute, absolute nightmare.

So in that case, I definitely see, you know, if they're mass producing certain elements that are that are large that it makes total sense to do it from the port of LA so hopefully that's what we'll see them do there yeah right they could just be locking it up though like if if it was available still and they had some indication that somebody else was sniffing around the port and they were like well we do really like that site we're not using it currently they could snatch it up and just hold on to it and maybe we don't see anything be developed for a year or two who knows that's true that's true and i was thinking you know in that case why don't they do all this stuff at boca chica since they're literally building a factory out there at this point maybe they're looking at the desert tim i i should have always counted on the desert yeah

i like your desert theory. It's a theory. The coastal access at the port of LA doesn't matter at all at that point. That's true. But, man, speaking of theories, I ran the numbers. You know flightclub.io, right? I sure do, yeah. DecoMurphy's Flight Club. Yeah, so I ran the numbers plugged in. So this is a website for those that you don't know what

this is the website where you can like basically literally like kind of build a rocket almost that you say how much propellant what engine and it will basically just run like a really realistic physics simulation of the capability of that and i did a starship with one engine you know and saying that you can change the variables, but pretending it's around 110 Tons which is I think what they're aspirationally hoping to get starship kind of down to Elon said even hopefully someday below 100 tons But well with we'll estimate it's around 110 So if you put 85 tons of fuel in there a raptor engine can just barely one raptor engine can just barely push that and You can't even quite catch you can't even make it to 20 kilometers um let alone saving fuel to actually do the landing so that's one of those reasons why if we're hearing um elon kind of talking about you know

only potentially one right now for static fire it will probably take three engines to do the actual like if they're if 20 kilometers is their target i mean they could easily it's a bit arbitrary anyway so they could make it you know 10 kilometers etc etc but man can you imagine how hard it's going to be for them to do a three engine landing burn after that like wacky maneuver thing i cannot wait to watch that i that is obviously like the most when you watch the full starship mission profile that's the part when you go wow they got to get that part right first before really anything else that's why i don't understand all this talk that we're gonna see a super heavy the booster part of starship we're gonna see that this year they're gonna go to orbit i'm like fly that sucker to 20 kilometers and back like 100 times before you're

even wasting any time getting up to orbit because if you can't do the last part then why have a starship shaped thing why not just build a giant second stage and make this a regular giant booster at that point? Right. Yeah. I mean, you're right at that point. Well, yeah. I see what you're saying. Especially with heat shielding considered in.

Heat shielding is going to take a while to get right on starship as well. So let that develop. Do a bunch of landings from 20 kilometers and back, and then worry about super heavy. If you say that super heavy is so easy, then like, why rush it? Right. That's true. I think that, yeah, I see exactly what you're saying. And I don't think you're wrong. One of the, one of the craziest things to think about is say that this vehicle is, you know, under 150 tons, you know, it's 120 tons or whatever coming in 150 tons to land maybe or whatever Raptor engines The best we know, you know, they max out at about 200 tons if you have three of them

It sounds like that, you know, they might be able to go below a hundred or below 50% throttle capability But there's not a lot of real numbers out there of whether or not they can actually hit below 50 because that's actually hard to Do deep throttling. Oh, yeah. The reason the Merlin's so good at it is because it has this pin tool injector. It kind of just, it has no problem doing deep throttling. But full throttling, or throttling down like that on a full flow stage combustion cycle engine is probably very complicated.

So let's say it can only do 50% throttle, and now you have three engines that have to be running for this landing burn. Now you're taking a vehicle that's 150 tons ish you're producing 300 tons of thrust so you're now landing at a two to one thrust to weight ratio which is the falcon 9 does the hover slam they call it you know because it's thrust to weight ratio can't go below one so it can't even hover it has to like nail it this is going to be nailing it on a whole nother level so that really makes me suspect of like man i which makes me think they'll have more than like 200 300 tons of fuel

remaining for the actual hop but i'd still have to run those numbers you know keep themselves a little bit more loaded to be a little bit more within constraints that they can deal with today i mean i don't know exactly if i'm looking at that landing it's like thrust away it's not my worry it's that tail whip you got to get that thing so right to come back in on that it's going to be especially with the simulation how low to the ground that it shows that happening oh my god that can't be right but yeah also they're making it look like it just does it like right on the ground almost like the coolest air show in the world yes just totally showing off at that point like hey check this out like i don't know why they for the first ones aren't

just doing that like really conservatively really high and landing like a falcon nine just so they can kind of make sure that there's you know things aren't sloshing around in those you know header tanks or that the fins move quick enough to do that maneuver and could be that the control structures are so large that they they can't maybe maybe there's some constraints on how big those suckers are they're big wings man they're big big pieces of machinery this whole thing is wacky and i know people were probably saying that same thing when they're watching spacex try to land a falcon 9 you know crs3 was the first rocket they had to put they put landing legs on and I literally heard I was at that was my first launch ever so I was with the press going out to the pad for that mission I'm literally hearing

people laughing at it you know saying this is so dumb and like why do they think they can do this how Elon's wasting his time what a what a joker he doesn't know what he's talking about you know and it seemed impossible. And now we see that, and now we're just absolutely shocked when they don't land. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're just like, I can't believe it didn't land. Starlink 4, whatever that was. How did that not land?

I can't believe it. And I'm sure it'll be the same thing with this. It's like, this maneuver is insane. But it makes a ton of sense Delta V-wise. You're using a huge surface area and all the atmosphere you can to slow yourself down without having to use you know there's no no re-entry burn you know there's no anything but a very mild landing probably less of a landing burn than the falcon 9 because it has that big belly flop maneuver it's doing a lot of aerodynamic

deceleration doesn't have to be all propulsive at that point. You know? Exactly. It's super cool, but it's super nutty. I mean, even though when you think about landing things, like pick anything that lands, it's crazy. A space shuttle, that was a crazy landing. They did this little loop-de-doop right before the runway. Like, that's going to work, okay? We're going to drift, glide back in from orbit and do a loop-de-doop.

What is that about? 747, you ever watch one of those land? That looks freaking nuts when that lands on a runway. In a strong crosswind. Yeah, it's like coming in sideways. That's crazy. It's insane.

Helicopters, how do they work? I've seen a guy fling helicopters, a helicopter taking giant logs, basically trees, and grabbing onto them and throwing them into a truck and doing it in this big pendulum momentum. And I'm like, how?

So if people can do that, I think a computer will be able to figure out this turn and burn maneuver, but it is just going to be nutty. It is the current thing that we think is totally nuts looking, but we've been so comfortable with so many other things happening in the space world that it's like

you know i the falcon 9 one is always weird because i never i never had that feeling that wow this is really nuts they're never gonna be able to pull this off i always felt like yeah they're gonna do it like yeah they're just they're working their way there it's no big deal uh i don't know if that was just me not knowing a lot back in the early days or if if i should have been more worried about it or if it just seemed like something that was possible i don't know but uh i don't know it's just it that incremental progress that we've seen from all of their programs if you don't look at that and get confidence in anything they're doing with Starship you're you're not really that's true being honest with yourself

it's true that's true and I just got reminded you know the original Falcon Heavy demo mission two years ago, there was someone that was north from like, I don't know where they were, but like maybe a ULA pad or something as an employee from the Cape. And they have this, just a cell phone video where you see them kind of just coming in. And it's one of the best perspectives

you'll have on the whole thing because you really get an understanding of how quickly they slam on their brakes. It looks like these things are about to crash. And they basically slam on their brakes because they use those three engine landing burn for a little bit of time and then just you know down to the one and they just slowly drop down it is that still does make me just kind of go wow yeah you know how can they do that it is unbelievable so you're right we get trained to get used to these things are trained to say like this is normal.

This is okay. This has been proven 100 times. Like roller coasters, you know, like no one's, you know, like they do some crazy stuff on roller coasters. I love that the concept of roller coasters is now where you're at. You're like, wow. We went from, like, being amazed at the Starship landing to everything in life. Like, how does that work?

Wow, look at this. This is great. How do they make lollipops? I mean, come on. What are we talking, you know? Yeah, you're exactly right. I may have got a little too far there. No, no.

I love the concept of how do roller coasters work. As an avid roller coaster tycoon player, I sometimes don't know. But you mentioned the Starlink 4 landing. We haven't heard anything on that, right? On what happened there? Nothing. Complete radio silence. Not even like a blip of like, oh, we figured this out.

Which kind of makes me, I don't know. I mean, I don't want to redo into it, but I wonder if they figured out something real bad and they're just like, shoot. Well, they're upgrading the thrusters on the drone ship right now. I don't know if you've been seeing that. So I'm starting to wonder if they had some pretty bad winds. Obviously, the fairings didn't come out too pretty that flight. I'm wondering if the ship and the booster both had a hard time position keeping.

And that's my standing theory is position keeping. And this is the first time we finally saw them really push it to the limits with weather. That's right, because this was delayed. Wasn't this the one that was delayed a day or two, right, for bad weather? So not... Yep, the first delay was for like a valve. The second delay was for weather. Landing's right, because this was delayed. Wasn't this the one that was delayed a day or two, right, for bad weather? So not- Yep, the first delay was for a valve. The second delay was for weather. Landing weather, too.

Landing weather, yeah. Recovery weather. Right, which is the last episode of this podcast, I went on a rant about how landing is part of mission success now. And I feel like there was a lot of takes that it's not part of mission success. Do you have a hot take about whether it is or is not? Ah, man.

And I heard you say that, too. And I kind of was like, I mean, I'm in agreeance that these days for SpaceX and for their customer base and to be able to live upon the promises that they're working on. Yeah, landing is a bigger deal than I think people. It's kind of beyond the experimental phase at this point. And this is into the operational phase and you're right they potentially lost out on you know millions um when that booster failed to land and just like you know when it was like b1050 i think it was crs16 was that other one that did a water landing that one didn't even get to refly once so i'm somewhere between like it's not as bad you know there's a certain level a tier of like how tragic it is

absolutely boosters still flew four times right it's not catastrophic by any means but it's a bad day it's it's still performed work four times it's still amortized the cost of that booster over four flights like that's amazing um but when we shouldn't forget that but like

yeah I think they probably had planned to fly that thing about ten times. So that kind of sucks. But is it? Yeah. I don't know. And you do have to start picturing, OK. And we talked about this.

I do a podcast with two other YouTube guys called Our Ludicrous Future. And one of them was saying, if that was Starship, people would have died. And I don't know if I quite agree with that. But they would have got hurt i don't know if i quite agree with that but yeah you know it would have they would have got hurt probably or whatever but you know the systems that starship will be significantly more redundant and more built around landing success you know because it will have human lives on board at some point that will absolutely rely on that being a successful maneuver a successful portion of the plan i don't expect people would be flying on the 50th landing of Starship. That's not my expectation.

Yeah. Yeah, you're right. You're right. It'll probably be a long time. I hope, especially if my desert plan works out. If my desert thing works out, man, that thing will be landing a ton. They'll be flying that every day up and down in the desert, you know? Just accept your DCX future,

SpaceX. That's what I'm really saying. Or just go hang out with Bezos and Blue Origin out there. Yeah, go out to West Texas. Exactly, exactly. You can keep all your Texas incentives and you're fine. Exactly. There is a lot of empty space out there. But that's the thing is that people, I think,

just don't necessarily understand is how big of a deal that is it when it works and when it doesn't work and why that's still a thing that spacex is five years ahead of anyone else on like quite literally is the whole propulsively landing and how big of a deal that will be when human lives really rely on that i mean we were talking about this too this too. If you think about it, the Apollo missions are really the only other time almost in history that human lives relied on propulsive rocket firing. Granted, they, of course, still had an abort procedure. But even that was relying on...

Also depended on a rocket. Depended on a rocket. So it is really weird that human lives will actually be you know at the helm of rockets and are we there yet i if you don't mind i have a question for you yeah let's do it because i know yeah so do you think it was smart in the grand scheme of things or maybe it's too soon to tell but you know the full flow stage combustion cycle cycle raptor engine is unbelievably complicated you'd really have a hard time convincing me it's too soon to tell, but... You know, the full flow stage combustion cycle Raptor engine is unbelievably complicated. You'd really have a hard time convincing me

it's not significantly more complicated than the Merlin engine. And do you think, if we're still just trying to make sure engines are, like, extremely reliable, do you think it's smart to have even pursued full flow stage combustion cycle if the Merlin would have worked

at, say, 10% of the performance? Man, I have not thought about this question that's a really interesting one to to consider because in some ways the the merlin they they the architecture of falcon 9 they sort of lucked into in that they were originally planning on parachute descent of for the first stage right uh they originally were planning nothing and then parachutes. And then they said, well, let's try propulsion when parachutes didn't work out. And it was really nice that they had nine smaller engines. So it wasn't, you know, they didn't have a master plan for the architecture of Falcon 9 on the Merlin. But it turns out that that was like the best decision they could have made.

So now they're able to fly it so frequently and they've got so much time with the Merlins and they're so fricking reliable. Uh, it's, it takes a long time to get back to that point with something, you know, of equivalent complexity, not only more complex with different propellants and different cycles. That is a really interesting question, but don't know man like i guess it comes down to if you think the engines are the point of the architecture that they need to get right versus all of the other things in the in the architecture that are more important that's true like flight profile is going to you know are the engines going to be the point of failure basically and i don't think so because i trust spacex engines like they're incredible they have one of the best if not the best engine

teams in the world yeah i definitely agree with that seeing how reliable the merlin has been it's really ever shut down once in flight ever you know and that was like very early on yeah out of the right five or six hundred engines they've ever You know, like they have a lot of experience with that. But that makes me wonder, like that Merlin engine is so simple, that pintle injector is so simple. Why, and I've had someone that I really trust ran the numbers on Starship

using like a methane powered Merlin, like an upgrade to the Merlin, but using the overall general architecture. It obviously probably be called something else, but merlin size merlin dimensions um and it would come within like 10 or 20 percent payload capacity for something like starship right and i'm just sitting there kind of almost wondering like that would have been so much easier to develop and i think it would have been flying already today, orbitally. I wonder how much this is. Had they been able to do that.

This kind of feels similar to me to the whole debate about carbon fiber starship where that never felt right to me because it was such a technological leap above. SpaceX does the best when they say, what are we working with today? Let's make that better in every way, but don't change everything.

And then the carbon fiber starship, various names that it was called when it was carbon fiber, that was like a significant departure from that strategy of innovating on small stuff to make something greater. And that's when, you know, Raptor was obviously in the pipeline for so long at this point. So they almost went through that phase where it was like, what is the ideal, most perfect thing that we could ever get? And it was full flow,

stage combustion, carbon fiber, and it was the ideals of everything. But Raptor made it to the finish line first. And so we are left with the most insanely efficient thing under a stainless steel spacecraft.

It's a little bit of a mismatch almost. It is. And or full flow allows the capability to make up some of those those mass differences and but let's be clear that for re-entry for a reusable vehicle i think mass wise i honestly think stainless steel can come ahead of of carbon fiber yeah yeah oh i'm a believer in stainless steel i'm just saying that there was this design phase that spacex clearly went through where it was like what is the ultimate version of this thing let's do that right yeah yeah that's true and you're right that i mean i i still hope you know because they're coming up on like around 20 or whatever these raptor engines that they're firing and they're still i i think they're still going boom quite occasionally but i i again we don't really have

good documentation on like the early merlin days but i'm hoping and guessing the merlin was a similar thing you know you just push it through its paces you blow up 20 of them you really start to figure out the tweaks you know and all the you figure out the secret sauce and next thing you know it's it's not a problem at all you know and i'm sure you really make me think though now that it's like the ultimate engine and is that gonna is that gonna compute with the rest of everything that they need that's a really interesting question like the linchpin and and you're going from someone that loves the raptor engine you know so much like i adore that thing but it's in the same sense of like like pretend these are race cars yes there might be ferrari out there racing against ford you know i don't know if you've seen

that movie i haven't watched it no like but like you know you might have a you know a company that has clearly a better you know more advanced engine but if it breaks down it doesn't matter you know and that's just an example i don't know but like i have a part of me that almost fears like at the end of the day who cares about performance when really reliability is the only metric that matters and the merlin is a reliable engine that is a rock solid engine and that's including the fact that it's sooty and it has to be kind of like torn down a lot more than a methane engine does right now imagine if it was burning on methane you know how much less refurbishment it would probably need you know it'd be amazing yeah this is some

deep stuff yeah i'm rethinking everything in my life i feel like i've exhausted my list of starship what else is what else is on your radar unless do you have any other starship topics or we can talk about what else on your radar well so i i just want to i would like to hedge your i want your bets let's let's go with a um i want your when and we're gonna do month month and year for these wow when do you think that the um okay here first off three questions one no four these are four this is growing by the minute one will there be a uh a flight of like the one of these you know serial number one two threes before the 20 kilometer hop that's number one i'll put these in order so you can be thinking about them number two when will

serial number or the 20 kilometer hop happen ish we'll say-ish. A high altitude hop. When will that happen? Three, how many high altitude non-full stack, non-orbital versions will there be? And then four, when will orbital Starship happen? By your best estimate. Orbital attempt.

This is not what I would decide. Because I'm moving this whole thing to the desert if I'm in command of Starship for a day i'm going full in on this desert idea so no we're doing all boca chica all right uh first one was will there be a a hop before 20 kilometers is that what you said no that's yes 100 yes um i think i think like higher than star hopper but not that high that's my guess and then when will the 20 kilometer happen month and year yeah yeah you can tell i'm really good at loading all these into my memory while i'm still thinking about all this month and year we're in february and i feel like based on the rate of things being rolled out and then tests being scaled back,

I'm going to say that it's not going to happen until like serial number six or seven. So I'm going to put that at like a year from today. I'm going to say February 28th, 2021, 20 kilometer hop. Wow. Wow, you went with the day. I went with the day. Yeah, I threw the day in, too. Why not?

Because they actually get 366 days to do that. Oh, you're right. You're giving them that bonus day. Yeah, because tomorrow's a bonus. They could just take tomorrow off and still have a full year. Okay. So that was that one. Then it was how many hops before orbital?

Yep. So that was that one. Then it was how many hops before orbital? Yeah. I'm going to guess that they do a six month, one flight every month or so suborbital hop. So I'm going to say that puts us at August, 2021. And then I hope that's, this is all contingent on them listening to me and not building super heavy until this point in time so then that puts us like end of 2021 where they try to launch a

super heavy so i'm doing i'm going i'm going december 2021 okay everyone's gonna hate me because i'm so pessimistic on it but it's not even that pessimistic i i think some of your things that you're pessimistic and you're you're i think you're right on a lot of fronts all right you have to do them all you have to do them all yeah you can't get out of this okay because you actually kind of you're right you're right on some things i i i think the let me i definitely think we'll actually see some kind of untethered hop. It might be a really short hover. It might be a 20-meter thing like we saw Starhopper do.

Just to check out all the systems, go up, make sure they can fire it, make sure the landing leg's compressed and do all the things or whatever they need to do. Just a very low-risk thing. And then they're just going to almost immediately, if that works, if that one's flight flight ready with hardware they fly it like you know a week later or something um that if that one has all the hardware attached i could also see them potentially doing that test before getting flaps and everything on it just just as another like all up systems test you know or almost all up systems test um And I think that would OK, so that would put for me, I think the 20 kilometer hop will happen by this summer.

I'm going to say I'm thinking end of May, early June is my guess. Some people right now are thinking it might be March. I just don't think that's I don't think I'm banking on there being a major redesign of some system that happens this year. And that's what pushes it a year out. OK, I mean, you're not wrong because that happens literally daily. So I'll still say, you know, I'm going to be optimistic. I'm actually going to go with May end of May this year for the for the high altitude hop.

I think we're only going to see three and assuming we don't see an explosion. No, that's what I'm assuming. That's why I'm guessing six because something's going to just plant itself into the dirt. Okay, I'm thinking... There's going to be a wing that falls off. 100% this is my bet. 100% a wing

falls off and it goes spinny. 100%. Oh man. If you just willed that into being i'm gonna be so mad but i'm gonna say i think i think we'll see three and i don't i don't want to say because that's one of them failed or if that's what it was supposed to be i think we'll see three before they try to go orbital i think they will be building star i think they're gonna build the booster while they're even still like working on the 20 kilometer hop even like i think the booster is gonna be i don't want them to do that and then they don't care what you know they don't and i think my guess would be orbital attempt already a year from now i think february

2021 all right that's that's my guess so i'm i'm i'm of me are, that would be like if Elon stays, because Elon's basically just down there all the time. He just lives there now. Yeah. He literally might for a time being, because I think he's doing like the Tesla Model 3 in a tent Elon Musk, where he can't sleep. He's obsessed with this.

He loves this. He's energized by this. He wants to see this progress. He's playing Kerbal in real life, you know? And he can't sleep because he's right about tobal in real life you know and he can't sleep because he's right about to finally make it you know to the jewel system and he's hoping to rendezvous with pole in a second you know he he's not sleeping and he loves this so that drive and when that happens and when he rallies the troops like that stuff happens at insane paces that

otherwise would just be no way you know and they're hiring people like you wouldn't believe that's why the part of me does think things are moving at such an insane pace we that otherwise it'd just be no way, you know, and they're hiring people like you wouldn't believe. That's why the part of me does think things are moving at such an insane pace, we can't, it'll be really hard to predict that curve. So a part of me thinks literally I might be eating my words and heading to Boca Chica in March to see a 20 kilometer hop. I hope so. Another part of me, I hope so too. And then another part of me thinks like it might be September before we see a 20 kilometer hop based on me trying to stock star hopper i went down to

star hopper in march of 2019 to see what i thought was going to be potentially either a static fire or an untethered hop it didn't do that until like june or july or whatever right yeah you know so and that's kind of where i'm guessing that is that it's like there's it's not that they can't do it's just that they are discovering all these things in the process so if they're guessing right now that serial number five is the one that's gonna hop i'm guessing it's like six or seven that's really where i'm at now the big the big thing that's out there before well maybe you have a different take on this does that orbital launch does that include like full heat shielding and atmospheric re-entry,

or are they just going to let this sucker burn up through the atmosphere to see what happens? Based on, uh, I've asked Elon about the heat shield thing. It feels like that's changed so many times. We're still not, but I've actually been getting kind of consistent answers that if they won't

worry about heat shielding for these suborbital ones, because it doesn't need that. And that when it goes orbital, they will start worrying about heat shields and really playing around with them. I'm in the mindset that I don't think they'll ever want to throw away hardware at this point. So I don't think even if, you know, they have a complete mission success with a super heavy booster landing, I don't think they'd want to even waste the starship and even risk like, oh, we'll just not worry about heat shield. I think that'll be one of those things that is required and figured out

and tested for the first orbital mission. I want to agree with you and I could 100% see it as a, to put it in a mean way, a stunt to put it in a nice way, a test because we have this fully built thing that just doesn't have heat shielding. Why not throw it up there and see what happens?

I wouldn't put it past them. Yeah. Also, you get to test out how well does stainless steel do unshielded all the way through. We could say, hey, now we know if a tile failed and here's what happens. Here's our test regime.

It's not a bad test. There's also been talks about there still being potentially transpirational cooling on certain areas, you know, like the hinges of the flaps, per se. You know, you can put heat shields in those hinges, but there can still be plasma and hot, you know, gas coming into those cracks, and those are really hard to protect. So if you purge that area with, you know, something that's higher pressure than the ambient air, you know, with, you know, you can even use methane. That was the talk with the transpirational cooling is pushing out like literally cool methane through these pores. And it's not necessarily about like, you know, people are going, well, how can you do that? But it's not necessarily about, about like cooling it down. You're not trying to necessarily, you're trying to create this

boundary layer. You're trying to create this boundary layer. You're trying to create this cushion where the thermal property doesn't get transferred onto the vehicle. You're pushing it away, and it's wicking off. It's almost acting like an ablative heat. It's like an ablative thing with gas. Exactly. It's taking it with it.

It's taking that energy away with it and creating a boundary layer that does not allow for the heat to transfer to the fuselage. So I think we'll still see things like that in certain hots certain hot spots but i do think it's going to be iterative i think you're right i think the first one might come in with less heat shielding than they want just to see where it gets really spicy and then start beefing it up from there or vice versa beef it up a lot see where it gets where it's like oh geez this didn't even get hot at all you know

let's trim this down so the reason that i am quibbling about this is that you say they don't want to throw away hardware, but that is all they're doing down there right now. They're just building hardware and getting rid of it. They're trashing it, you know? So why not trash one orbital? But that's, they're trashing stainless steel. Yeah. Basically, at this point, they're just trashing.

They're not trashing a you know five million dollar bespoke raptor engine or three of them or seven of them you know okay well i guess that depends on like where the ones that have been used so far for star hopper for testing what are they doing with those are they still actively using them are they refurbishing them for flight are they raptors that that were i think some of them raptors that were that i hope to see in the museum someday yeah you know i would love oh god as much as like there's so much history that gets hidden away you know and just lost to junkyards and stuff like that can you imagine seeing some of the first raptor engines that have the battle scars you know

oh like i know that that's not good PR for a rocket company to do, but, like, that's some of the coolest stuff in the world, and it does show your progress. It shows, you know, this is what is hard. Here's what we have to build. Here's what we had to do. Here's what we had to change.

And there's definitely, like, something really inspirational about seeing hardware like that that has been beaten around, and even when you see, like, a space shuttle, you shuttle you know in person you see the heat shields that have the the most impressive thing is seeing all the scorch marks seeing what it had to survive totally that's the best part of looking at one up close like wow look at all this all these flights and discovery had that look that was just like boy that thing has been to space a lot you could just tell it you know the other ones are a little more shiny but discovery had this dingy property about it that's just the best like star wars you know it looked

it looked beaten up used you know used properly used and that's the coolest thing ever same with the falcon 9 boosters now you know they're coming in they're flying four or five times now you know and they're just getting sootier and sootier and more and more scorched and it's awesome it is so cool so i hope we see more of that i hope someday there's just like this like library or museum of like iterative engines or something you know one could hope i'd pay a lot a lot of money to see that that'd be awesome it can be you'd sponsor it the everyday astronaut museum of museum of failure museum of failure i hope to be in that as well no you can't speaking of not failure can you tell everyone what you've been up to lately i would love

for you to talk a little bit if somebody has not experienced the full tim dodd yet yeah so my video my video output has slowed down to basically a halt since January 1st. It's not entirely intentional. I have a lot of stress about that because normally I try to produce one or two a month, and I'm like to zero in two months now. But it's been a number of things. I've been actually in Florida almost the entire year. I'm working on a few different projects down here that will kind of come together to make so I have good live streaming solutions, you know, because there's some really big launches coming up this year. I'm working on a few different projects down here that will kind of come together to make so

I have good live streaming solutions. There's some really big launches coming up this year. We have Mars 2020, DM2, hopefully some more stuff with Starliner, of course. There's just a lot of really exciting missions happening this year. I like seeing launches. They're invigorating

and I like being down here and part of that energy, but I don't like when my live stream coverage is worse than it is at home. Like that's. So I'm trying to make a better solution for that. And including some like telescopes and things like that. Getting a library put together of some high speed 4K footage. But meanwhile, I've also been scripting this. It's done.

I think it's 18 pages of script about how much do rockets pollute. And I'm really comparing their exact outputs and comparing them against other things like the airline. I tell you exactly what comes out of different engines, different fuels. I tell you exactly what comes out of different rockets and comparing even like how much CO2 per passenger on a rocket and different rockets compared to airliners and then compared to the rest of the world. What environmental impact do they have on our air and that's just one of three that i'll be working on so i'll be doing another one then about ground and ocean pollution and another one about space debris too so nice it's uh it's uh it's been a nutty nutty year i've got a whole

backlog of um of videos that i want to work on but for now it's just like i've got all these other things in the background that i'm working on that i hope uh hope will make it there's there's a serious consideration of burnout in as a content creator yes you know you are correct work yes or you just are like i i can't do this again and i'm just trying to make sure that i'm staying on top of of loving my job you, and I'm and I'm in doing it for the right reasons and not just to get content out there. Not trying to just feed that frenzy of like, I got to get a video out every other week, you know, or else life's going to be over. Like life's more than making a video all the time. So I'm trying to just kind of balance a bunch of things right now. And yeah, it'll be cool, though.

I think I think spending more time down here will be awesome and I'll be able to have some really cool things coming up in the future so you make me feel like there's a spot for the community of us to have a show that's not about space but it's about making all the stuff that we put out there because there's a lot of the behind the scenes stuff that i feel like people would be really into so that's something to consider there's there is so much behind i have so much respect for people that do weekly things and just all the things behind the scenes the oh crap the show is tomorrow i had to read this article tonight at 3 a.m so i can understand it and grasp it you know before i do the recording tomorrow whatever like there's so many of those little things that people don't necessarily understand goes on behind the scenes and um the pressure is real you know you get this this real pressure on

yourself that you're putting on yourself and other people might be like hey it's been two weeks or three yeah you'll get that to the drive-by tweet like hey man where are you gone or you did you quit like no i'm just thinking about stuff yeah like give me a minute man like please you talk for a half hour straight to yourself see what happens exactly that's the whole thing we should do something on that i feel like dude i'll anytime anytime not to add yet another creative endeavor to the list of creative endeavors that we're talking about that's a whole that's that's yeah there you go now you just made a yeah you just made a wheel a wheel of misfortune or something. I don't know.

Yeah. Can you tell me about that? You mentioned a telescope. I saw some short video of you like driving some, what looked like a mech, I'm going to say, that I was, I don't know, I couldn't find the video again. I saw it once. Can you tell me about it? Yeah.

once can you tell me about it yeah so uh we ended up getting uh i got a 10 inch 2500 millimeter mead 10 uh telescope an lx 200 um from these uh vista in vista california there's this company called opt telescopes they're kind of like the if you want to buy a telescope that's who you buy a telescope from and i'm working with them now they're actually sending another one and we're setting up these control stations so that we can... We're using this guy named... His name's Astronomy Live on YouTube, but his name's Scott Ferguson in real life,

and he developed this software that allows you... Yeah, real life and internet. But he developed this software that makes it so you can drive telescopes with, like, a traditional joystick. So you have, like, a throttle to help change your speed and fine-tune your speed, and then the joystick to actually track it and so i'm trying to get a handful of those going and like the solution to like be able to make it so we can cover each launch with them but my dream someday is i would love to be able to like invite other

people out to try one out you know i would love to try one of those things because that looked amazing it's dude it's so cool. And we're getting in there like so tight that you can only see, you know, even if we're shooting vertically, which is a sin anyway, you can only see

about a third of the rocket. You know, because we're only three miles, you know, five kilometers away. We are really close with a really, you know,

5,000 millimeter equivalent telescope. And it feels insane. It's really fun. it's a fun challenge so yeah that's what i'm amazing one of those things i'm working on yeah awesome tim well i will uh hopefully see you down at a launch soon enough hoping to get down there from dm2 and hopefully that happens pretty soon maybe i'll see in boca chica but in some way i'm hoping to see you in real life so i can call you tim dot in real life

ever dash not on youtube i love it i love it cool man sounds good man thank you so much for joining me uh i'm sure you'll be back because we got this whole betting thing that we've got to write down somewhere and keep it in our back pocket so that we can make fun of each other for whoever's right or wrong or maybe we're both wrong and we're happily wrong at that. I love it. I love it. We better take notes, and hopefully the internet reminds us, too,

of who's more right or wrong when it comes to this stuff. I'm sure they will. Thanks again to Tim for joining me on the show. It is always wonderful to talk with him. He's the perfect person to bring on and talk with for an hour about Starship, about all those different things that we got into. So huge thanks to Tim for coming on the show. And

if you have not checked him out on YouTube, please do. He is youtube.com slash everyday astronaut. He's got a ton of videos that will really keep you entertained and informed. And obviously he's working on a lot as well as he was telling us there. So check him out if you have not already. But before we get out of here for the day, I want to say a huge thank you to everyone who made this episode of Main Engine Cutoff possible. We are sponsored by you, the listeners, directly. If you want to help out to support the show,

head over to mainenginecutoff.com slash support. There are 382 of you supporting the show every single month, and that includes 37 executive producers who produced this episode of Main Engine Cutoff. Thanks to Brandon, Chris, Pat, Matt, George, Brad, Ryan, Nadeem, Peter, Donald, Lee, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, John, Moritz, Joel, Jan, Grant, Mike, David, Mintz, Eunice, Rob,

Tim Dodd, the Everday Astronaut himself, Frank, Julian, and Lars from Agile Space, Tommy, Adam, and six anonymous executive producers. Thank you all so much for your support at this level. It is a huge, huge benefit to the show, and it really makes everything possible that we do here. I'm upgrading some of my audio hardware this week so that I'll be ready if I'm able to get down to DM2 or Starship or some other events this year, because there's a lot going on as we were talking about. So hopefully I can do that, and it's thanks to you that I can do those kind of trips. So if you want to help make that stuff possible, head over to mainenginecutoff.com support. And for now, that is all I've got for you this week. Thanks again for listening.

If you've got any questions or thoughts, email me anthony at mainenginecutoff.com or hit me up on Twitter at wehavemiko. And until next time, thank you all so much. I'll talk to you soon. Bye.